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Nosh: Hot Pepper and Tomato Sauce

Hey, all.

First things first: regarding my previous post about damage done to my external hard drive, the verdict is in. My photographs have been deemed unrecoverable. Gone. Kaput. I still have some stored in various places, and (silver lining, I suppose) most of the images I posted on this blog are what I considered among the best of my photographs. So I have the blog photos too, of course. It breaks my heart; there were a lot of shots I wasn’t done with yet, but I wallowed long enough and wallowing won’t bring them back. The fact remains that they are unrecoverable and I am tired of wallowing. Ever forward.

Now. On to the good stuff.

Oh, this pepper…sauce? Condiment? Magical addition to one’s food lineup? A word of warning: if you don’t like garlic or hot and spicy food, then this recipe is soooooo not for you. But for me? Garlic + spicy = perfect. We are in the home stretch of vegan January (necessary to rid myself of the clutter of forty pounds of butter I ate while making cookies this holiday season) so it’s perfect for us to eat right now, but it’s always good. I’ve made this so many times that I don’t remember where I first heard about it, and I think by now the recipe for it has coded itself into my DNA. Do note: it takes 40-45 minutes to cook, so it’s not a super-speedy recipe, but it’s all delicious. Here’s what you need:

2 large-ish bell peppers (whichever color you prefer)

2 hot peppers; I generally stick with serranos but use whatever you’d like

2 or 3 or 4 cloves of garlic; it’s all dependent on your taste. And my taste for garlic is deep and abiding.

2 cups tomato puree

1 (ish) cup vegetable stock

Salt and pepper to taste

Oil

That’s it! No long list of spices, no hard-to-get ingredients. That’s one of the things I love about this pepper sauce. It’s a simple approach that makes things that already taste really good, like peppers and tomatoes and garlic, even better. Getting started: Assemble your ingredients.

Off to a good start!

Start some oil in a pan, over low-to-medium heat. Cut the bell peppers into nice, bitey chunks. Slice the serranos into nice, thin wheels. The sauce is supposed to be hot, so don’t remove the seeds from the hot peppers. Cut the garlic into thin slivers. Toss everything in the pan and add some salt.

Use gentle heat to coax out the flavors.

Let these start to cook, but stay nearby and stir the peppers and garlic fairly regularly. You want them to get soft, you don’t want them to fry and get crisp. After about twenty minutes, they should be nice and soft–not totally squishy, but definitely flexible.

On their way to savory goodness.

Once the peppers and garlic are ready, add the tomato puree and enough vegetable stock to give the ingredients something to hang out in for a while. I found that a cup of stock tends to work. Give the mixture a taste; because of the varying and unpredictable heat of hot peppers (if you look up serranos on theScoville Heat Scale, you’ll see their heat ranges from 6,000 to 23,000 units, and there’s no way to tell which peppers are hottest without cutting them open and tasting them), your sauce may actually need another jolt of spice.

If you find that’s the case, don’t be afraid to shake in a little more hot pepper; cayenne works well. But be judicious about adding in extra cayenne. The sauce will thicken and concentrate the flavors, and you don’t want your beautiful spicy sauce to morph into a pan full of molten agony. If it’s still not spicy enough for your liking at the end of the cooking time, sprinkle in a little more cayenne and call it a day. Continue the cooking at the same medium-low temperature, and–again–stir it fairly regularly. At the end of another twenty minutes or so, you should have a nice, thick sauce. You can always use theback of the spoon testto see if the sauce is thick enough. Add salt and black pepper to taste.

Yep. Plenty thick.

Ahhhh…now it’s ready.

So what do we do with this? Oh, so very many things. This hot pepper sauce can be:

Schmeared on sandwiches

Stirred into pasta sauce

On top of chicken breast

It tastes great with arugula. So…anything with that

Mixed into beans

Over a baked potato topped with broccoli and cheese (I speak from experience)

And so on. The possibilities are endless!

The first thing we made with this batch was hummus and pita pizzas. Homemade pizzas of any ilk are a great way to use up random leftovers and/or open things in the fridge, so see what you’ve got in there and go for it. Here’s how:

Preheat the oven to 400°. Smear some hummus on howevermany pita breads you want to make and place them on a cookie tray. Spread some of your delicious, spicy, peppery, tomato-y sauce on the hummus.

Oh, hells yeah!

This is a delicious nosh as it stands, right now, with nothing else done to it. But hold on! We can make it even better.

Top this with whatever you choose. George and I had some onions we’d chopped up and an open bag of arugula (a staple in this house) sitting in our fridge, so on they went. We also had a bunch of leftover roasted acorn squash, so that got chopped up and put on top.

Almost home!

We put that in the oven and let it all roast for 12-ish minutes; turn the baking sheet once after 8 minutes or so to check on how it’s doing. When you take the pitas out of the oven, top them with some fresh parsley, if you have any on hand. In the end, you’ll have a lovely, toasty pita topped with roasted veggies, hummus that turns almost nutty in the oven, and this amazing, savory, thick, spicy, all-around vegtastic, and (best of all) healthy sauce. Because that’s how we do in central PA.

Plus, it’s good cold the next day.

Vegan January ain’t so hard to handle when you get to eat food like this. Enjoy!

I am so sorry about your photos. I only began on the computer in 2008 and I managed to delete 21,000. family photos covering over 10 years irretrievably. We bought a program that was eventually able to restore most of them in total random order. The program cost about $90.00 I think. I cried for days. I understand. Apple told us the name, I forget.

We took the external hard drive to a local computer guru shop (who I’ve worked with before and trust) and they couldn’t fix it. They sent my hard drive to a data retrieval service, who stood to make hundreds of dollars from me if they were able to retrieve my data, but when they cracked the case to look at the drive, they said the platters the information was stored on were damaged. And so. They are useless. Inaccessible. They’re shipping it back to me and I will send it to a second retrieval service in the interests of getting a second opinion, but I’m not getting my hopes up. Thanks for the shoulder! Oh, man, how I cried.

I feel your pain, Terri! Just before Christmas, I discovered that the external hard drive I’d saved all my 2013 photos on (and some from previous years), had decided not to work. Took it to Best Buy, where they told me that brand of hard drive was known to fail easily, and they’d send it away for document retrieval, for a mere $600 and no guarantees. No, thank you very much. Surely, I didn’t shoot anything in 2013 I will want to see again, will I? I’ll be looking into Amazon Prime’s free cloud storage option, and going back to saving everything on CD. 😦

Oh my god, Angie! I am so, so sorry! You know, data retrieval IS expensive but the companies who specialize in it will often evaluate your data free of charge and only charge you if they can get your data back. The platters that stored my data were damaged in the drop, hence the unrecoverable verdict. But you…if you have an internal communication fail they may be able to help you. If you still have the hard drive you can look into it, but I’m sure the $600 price tag won’t change. And yes, I’m lining up my CDs for backup storage. And the cloud. And at least I’m not wallowing in my bed. Ever forward, friend. I am so very sorry.

I’m with you. Damned, but not wallowing. If I thought they could retrieve my photos, and if I thought those photos were worth $600, I’d be more inclined. But unemployed me is all, what? Hell no! None of my photos is worth $600!!! Still, though, when you buy a terrabyte of storage on an external hard drive, it’d be nice if you had at least a little bit of storage! Forward, indeed. Hubby has saved my best photos from 2013 onto his computer, so as long as it doesn’t fail, we’re good. Thank goodness we make a book of our best photos every year, so he has some of my best.

Right. Like I am thankful for the photos I’ve posted on my blog, and what I’d put up on Tumblr a while ago. And Facebook. I’ve been going through various resources and trying to assemble what I’ve got left. Anyway. Here’s to the world still being a beautiful place, and lots more photo ops in the future.